SEO Auditing

Check and fix technical SEO issues in a web project.

Audit Checklist

1. Meta Tags

Every page must have:

<head>
  <title>Page Title — Site Name</title>
  <meta name="description" content="155 chars max, compelling summary" />
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
</head>

Check for:

Unique <title> per page (50-60 chars)
Unique <meta description> per page (120-155 chars)
Canonical URL set (avoids duplicate content)
No noindex on pages that should be indexed

2. Open Graph & Social

<meta property="og:title" content="Page Title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description for social sharing" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og-image.png" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />

OG image should be 1200x630px
Test with https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ and https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

3. Structured Data (JSON-LD)

Add schema markup for rich search results:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Article Title",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Author Name" },
  "datePublished": "2026-04-10",
  "image": "https://example.com/image.jpg"
}
</script>

Common types: Article, Product, FAQPage, Organization, BreadcrumbList

Test with: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

4. Sitemap

/sitemap.xml should:

List all indexable pages
Include <lastmod> dates
Exclude pages with noindex
Be under 50MB / 50,000 URLs per file
Be referenced in robots.txt

5. Robots.txt

/robots.txt should:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /admin/
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Not block CSS/JS files (search engines need them to render)
Not block pages you want indexed

6. Performance (Core Web Vitals)

Metric	Good	Needs Work
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)	< 2.5s	> 4.0s
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)	< 200ms	> 500ms
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)	< 0.1	> 0.25

Key fixes:

Compress and lazy-load images
Preload critical fonts and CSS
Avoid layout shifts from dynamic content
Use next/image or equivalent for automatic optimization

7. Crawlability

All important pages are reachable from internal links
No orphan pages (pages with zero internal links)
No redirect chains (A→B→C should be A→C)
404 pages return proper HTTP 404 status
No broken internal links

8. Accessibility (SEO Signals)

All images have alt text
Heading hierarchy is correct (one h1, then h2, h3 etc.)
Links have descriptive text (not "click here")
Language attribute set: <html lang="en">

Quick Automated Check

# Check robots.txt
curl -s https://example.com/robots.txt

# Check sitemap
curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | head -20

# Check meta tags
curl -s https://example.com | grep -E '<title>|<meta name="description"|<link rel="canonical"'

# Check HTTP status codes
curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" https://example.com/page

Tips

Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools → check SEO score
Google Search Console is the source of truth for indexing issues
Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor — test on mobile viewports
Page speed directly affects rankings — optimize Core Web Vitals

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